Many mobile devices are capable of creating and displaying media objects. For example, digital cameras, smartphones, tablets and PDAs are frequently capable of taking photos, recording audio and/or capturing video, displaying photos and videos, and playing audio. It is common for the owners of such devices to create media objects at a faster rate than they delete the media objects they have created. Consequently, the size of personal media object collections seems to be ever increasing. For example, it is not uncommon for the owner of a smartphone to have a collection of thousands of photos and/or videos taken using the smartphone.
A personal collection of media objects may be stored entirely on the device used to create the media objects, or distributed among several locations. For example, one user may retain all photos and videos taken by a smartphone on the smartphone. On the hand, another user may periodically upload some photos to a photo application on a desktop computer, to various social networks, and/or to online services designed media object sharing.
Having created such large collections of media objects, users frequently want to share their media objects with others. While a mobile device owner may know exactly which media object she wants to share, the challenge is finding that particular media object with the user's collection. The task of finding the media object is even more difficult when the device through which the navigation is to be performed is a mobile device with a relatively small display.
Unfortunately, the larger the collection of media objects, the more difficult it is to use a mobile device to show specific media objects to others. For example, when thousands of photos are involved, scrolling through the photos to find the one you want to show a friend is time-consuming and cumbersome. Displaying a large number of photos at a time may speed up the scrolling process, but is not a feasible solution either, because the relatively small display of mobile devices limits how many photos can be concurrently displayed while still being recognizable. Displaying hundreds of photos at once would result in photos so small that the user would not be able to easily identify the particular photo the user desires to show the friend.
As an alternative to scrolling, some photo management systems allow users to find photos by (a) text searching based on metadata tags, (b) specifying metadata filters, and/or (c) performing image similarity searches. Unfortunately, when a mobile device is involved, these alternatives may also be cumbersome. For example, entering text for a text search is often cumbersome on a mobile device. In the case of metadata filters, simply showing all of the filters that are available may be too much to fit well on the limited display screen of a mobile device. An image similarity search, on the other hand, is only useful once a user has identified a photo of interest. It does not address the problem of finding that photo in the first place.
Thus, there is a need for a mechanism that allows users to efficiently navigate, using the relatively small display of a mobile device, to specific media objects they would like to show and/or play to others using the mobile device.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.